this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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GenZedong
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It depends on which government.
The US is still a federal system with states acting as sovereign entities with powers and responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is for disaster relief. FEMA is there to provide guidance and resources, but disaster relief is supposed to be deployed at the state level. This is one of reasons why the National Guard has responsibilities to individual states.
Hawaii has never seen any wildfire or wildfire conditions like this before: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/climate/hawaii-fires-climate-change.html
Of course there should be preparations to counter climate change as it continues to aggravate situations like this, but I don't like the excuse where the feds can blame the states and the states can blame the feds when shit hits the fan. It has become an excuse for inaction. Hurricane Katrina, Texas ice storms, California wildfires, the Kentucky floods, this could have been sorted out looonng ago.
Why do we make the choice to keep things this way when they always lead to disasters?
The problem is that the alternative is having the federal government immediately intervene in any emergency, which states would likely complain about.
I guess the problem then is I care about having a government that doesn't want to kill me or leave me to die, then. Excuse me, I should have been caring about civility within our decaying governing structure while people roast alive on the street! Oh you've made me see the light, you sure have.
I'm not trying to convince you this is correct, just explaining the politics behind why the situation exists. Or maybe you want a strongman who will protect you until they don't.
Are you seriously doing the Tough Independent Rugged Real American LARP here?
Did you build your own home? Do you repair your own roads? Do you check your own food for botulism?
I was noting that the failure of the disaster response seems to be due to local government officials failing in their job.
What is the responsibility of a larger government entity for the governance of cities?
Presenting a oh-so-large-its-scary government entity assisting locally during a disaster as a bad thing is certainly a take.
The federal government can assist, it just needs local permission to do so.
This skews awful close to typical AM radio "the SHERIFFS need to have DIRECT CONTROL of the counties to BRING LAW AND ORDER back to THE STREETS" chud rambling. Local isn't always better, especially not in Sundown State petty tyrannies with echoes of the Confederacy.
And the federal government is mobilizing to assist, but they aren't going to be in the initial response.
What does any of that dialing back of your tough independent American rhetoric have to do with this?
I wasn't giving you a tough independent American rhetoric, I was explaining how American government works and you took it as something else.
Federalism is baked into how the USA governs itself. I can't explain disaster response without noting who the lead government agency is.
Yeah it works through tough independent rhetoric as domestic policy as an excuse to neglect and fuck over people with a thin veneer of that neglect being for their own good.
That's the fancy word for the alienated independence ideology that drives the incompetent and neglectful system, yeah sure.
It you know better, how do you make the federal government the lead agency in responding to natural disasters?
EDIT: Here's a freebie, just for you and your
style debatebro bullshit: China's response is clearly better than what's going on in Maui.
In this one case, but there is also the 90 tonnes of steel AI Weiwei straightened after the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake.
But your own this one case makes Burgerland superior to the See See Pee because that's different!
I never said better.
So you were doing some exhaustive and tiresome devil's advocate nonsense and/or are trying to dial back your ridiculously bad original take where you presented a strong centralized government response as some sort of scary nanny state that only the weak yearn for, and that you have a knee-jerk reaction about.
I never said a strong centralized government was bad, just that it wouldn't be tolerated in the current political framework.
You interpreted that as being bad.
You're waffling and playing sophistic games that are not unlike
and your political ideology seems to come from the same source.
Checks out.
Or maybe you just want someone to argue with.
That's rich coming from you, especially after your
flag-humping session that started with this:
The crumbling and neglected infrastructure and decaying social institutions of Freedomland are cool and good and no worse than the evil See See Pee because something something federalism and how that's totally working out great promise guys for real guys
I was mentioning it in the context of the USA. I've been bringing up Trump as an example of a person in charge of the federal government who didn't respond to requests from states for aid. During COVID, the federal government denied assistance to states that were politically against Trump. Putting all disaster response in the hands of the federal government could cause a similar case to happen in the future.
Claiming that the federal/central government should by default rely, especially in the context of the crumbling and eroding infrastructural and social conditions of the United States, on alienated and isolated first responses from counties or townships or whatever is left in impoverished parts of the country is idealistic nonsense that ignores the actual conditions of those places.
And Maui isn't even nearly one of the most impoverished areas and look how badly that went.
It's the responsibility of the larger government entity to step in in some cases. Like in the cases of natural (or semi-natural) disasters or if the local governance shits the bed to the extent that people are dying. We're not dealing with free imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire here, cities aren't sovereign entities they're administrative regions for the government.
But how long does it take to figure that out? A few days?
This isn't the Holy Roman Empire, but the bureaucracy isn't as fast as people think it is and the initial response is still expected to be lead by the state. By the time it becomes apparent the federal government should step in, the response has already failed.
But in the end, there needs to be a specific authority to answer to disasters. Right now, and for a while, it is state governments as making the federal government responsible erodes state sovereignty.
Outside of Trump, the federal government is there to help when asked, but it is still the responsibility of the states to manage response efforts.
Our state and federal governments also don't have issues working together outside of a Trump led administration, but the first emergency response is expected to be led by local and state governments that the disaster happens in.
My state routinely lends state disaster response units around the country to make sure that they are up to speed on different methods of disaster response in disasters that my state expects to see. However, it isn't all disasters as my state doesn't get all disasters.
And I'm explaining the American thinking as the disaster is occurring in the United States of America.
If you want to bring up Katrina, W Bush wasn't asked to bring in more resources by the state of Louisiana after landfall.
Name a time outside of Trump where the federal government denied aid to a state requesting it.
I responded to a direct question regarding a failure in government aid. It isn't sealioning to ask for an example to a claim that something is commonplace.
Then let the states complain or, better yet, dissolve the fuckers